Rationale and objectives: This study was designed to develop an automated method for estimating lung volume removed during lung volume reduction surgery (LVRS) using computed tomography (CT).
Materials and methods: The CT examinations of six patients who underwent bilateral LVRS were analyzed in this study. The resected lung tissue (right and left) was weighed during pathologic examination. An automated computer scheme was developed to estimate the lung volume removed using the CT voxel values and lung specimen weight. The computed fraction of lung volume removed was evaluated across a range of simulated surgical planes (ie, other than parallel to the CT image plane) and CT reconstruction kernels, and it was compared with the surgeons' postsurgical estimates.
Results: The computed fraction of the lung volume removed during LVRS was linearly correlated with the resected lung tissue weight (Pearson correlation = 0.697, P = .012). The computed fraction of lung volume removed ranged from 12.9% to 51.7% of the total lung volume. The surgeons' postsurgical estimates of lung volume removed ranged from 30% to 33%. The percent difference between the surgeons' estimates and the computed lung volume removed as a percentage of the surgeons' estimates ranged from -72.3% to 57.0% with mean absolute difference of 29.7% (+/-20.7).
Conclusion: The preliminary findings of this study suggest that the proposed quantitative model should provide an objective measure of lung volume removed during LVRS that may be used to investigate the relationship between lung volume removed and outcome.